Don't ask, Don't tell
Congress gives short shrift to its intelligence oversight duties
James Pavitt would seem an unlikely backer of Congress's role as a watchdog over the nation's intelligence agencies. For the past three decades, he has been in the business of "stealing secrets," he says, as a CIA covert officer. But Pavitt, who retired last month as the CIA's top spy--its deputy director of operations--says that in practice, Congress did little to ensure that the CIA had the right resources to target terrorists before Sept. 11, 2001. "Where was the concern? Where was the intrusive oversight? . . . They weren't there," Pavitt told U.S. News in a rare interview. "On the 12th of September, Congress said, 'Oh my God, they need more.' What the hell were they doing?" Sadly, he adds, it's only gotten worse in the wake of the attacks: "I have never, in my 31 years in the business, seen the kind of partisanship I saw in the past 13 months."
The frustration is widely shared. The 9/11 commission is similarly dismissive of congressional oversight in its final report, saying that both the House and Senate intelligence committees "lack the power, influence, and sustained capability" to properly oversee the nation's 15 intelligence agencies. The commission went even further, saying that Congress shares the blame for pre-9/11 intelligence failures and calling reform of its overlapping committee structure key to fixing the larger problem.
Former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke recalls being summoned to brief eight different committees, adding, "And that's just in the Senate." But even as members of Congress hold a spate of hearings about proposals for serious structural reform of intelligence agencies, few are talking about fixing their own house. Lawmakers are notoriously territorial. "What is happening right now is that the dirtiest four-letter word in government--spelled t-u-r-f--is playing out on both sides," says Rep. Jane Harman, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.
"Dealing with a weakling." Many in the intelligence world hark back to the brief period in the 1980s when Congress succeeded in performing serious and nonpartisan oversight. But gradually, the increasingly bitter partisan squabbles on Capitol Hill began to spill over more frequently into the previously collegial intelligence committees. "There has been basically a collapse of the oversight system, particularly in the Senate, since the mid-1990s," says Marvin Ott, who worked for both the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee before joining the National War College. "Everyone dealing with the intelligence committees in the intelligence world knows they are dealing with a weakling."
Congress has a tough job. Lawmakers have a steep learning curve when it comes to the secret, arcane $40 billion intelligence community. With term limits on both intelligence committees, members have difficulty building up knowledge and rely heavily on their professional staffers to prepare them for hearings. "The members don't even understand their own questions; it's clear they're being fed them from staff," says one senior intelligence official who has testified in committee sessions that are closed to the public. "We have to suggest to them what questions to ask us--it's appalling."
advertisement
